Disciple Bible Study, 10-2-19, Isaiah Part I

So this is first Isaiah.

It's called this because we believe there's actually three different distinct authors that form the one book that we've got.

Diction syntax, totally different, between chapters 1 through 39, that's 1 Isaiah.

Deutero Isaiah, which means second, that's 40 through 55, and then the rest of the book is called Trito Isaiah III.

Again, we believe them to be three different people writing in three different time periods with different circumstances.

So this is the first one.

And um I wanted to see if there were things that you found compelling or curious or challenging from what we read.

We didn't read all of first Isaiah.

We skipped a few chapters, but we read the bookends, right?

The first third and the last third.

So compelling, curious, or confusing, or challenging.

Those are our, those are our um, or or whatever you want to talk about instead of that.

Well, please um I did notice it in I don't remember what chapter it was, but at one point God said, I'm tired of these sacrifices.

Um I'm wondering if after that, if that was the end of the practice of sacrificing lambs, animals, and such, would have been some time in what would it be the 750s, 750, whatever.

So really happy to answer that question historically.

It appears that um sacrifices at the temple go uninterrupted until its destruction in the year 586.

Um BCE.

So uninterrupted until then.

Now, there were some challenges because the the first 586 is the end.

It's the end because the temple's burned to the ground.

Yeah, so there can't be any more at that place.

I I'm gonna mitigate that a little bit.

But um the Babylonians come.

This guy is not riding at this time.

He's writing around 720.

And he's talking about Assyria, right?

So the temple's not destroyed for another 130 years after what we just read.

Um it happens in a couple of phases.

There's an exile where the literate people are taken.

Those are the like the high priests were the first group taken by the Babylonians in the year 596.

And then they do it again in 593.

So think of it like the bishops and the priests got taken, and then the deacons.

And then when you say got taken, to it to Babylon.

Right, but the the temple wasn't destroyed at that point.

Not until 586.

So the Babylonians came in and said, You you, you're coming with me.

Yep.

And they left everybody else alone.

Then they took the middle class, yeah, and then they took anybody left they thought worth taking in 586 and destroyed the temple.

Now, probably people continued to offer sacrifices on the temple mount because in Jerusalem it is the relative maximum in the city.

So, oddly enough, like the Mount of Olives, if you know the story, is much higher than Mount Moriah.

But Jerusalem's built sort of next to Mount Moriah, and there's the Kidron Valley between it and the Mount of Olives.

So people probably were sacrificing on the top of Mount of Olives.

That would be like a high place to pagan gods.

But the temple was built here, and when it's destroyed, it's still a highish place.

So it's probably people continue to offer sacrifices there.

Um, the temple is rebuilt by Ezra in 530 BC, so it's it's destroyed for about 50 years before another one's rebuilt.

Sacrifices are offered in that temple until the Romans burn Jerusalem to the ground in 70.

And then maybe people are sacrificing on the ruins again.

You know, our Jewish brothers and sisters don't offer sacrifices anymore, by and large.

There's some very super weird people who do this.

But um, because the temple's gone.

And if there were a temple, the sacrificial system would be reinstituted in the minds of some of our Jewish brothers and sisters.

For some of them, it's totally done, don't need to do it anymore.

So you get different responses, but in general, when this is written, people are still doing it.

I guess my way already, God said, I'm done.

I don't want I'm tired, I'm tired, basically, I'm tired of them, they don't smell good anymore.

Um so at least at this point, yeah, God has said I don't know anymore.

And I think people continue to do it.

I think God's like, we can do it, but it doesn't mean me anymore.

You know, I I I I I I appreciate that, and I think I think what's helpful to hear, and I don't I don't want to answer this definitively.

Obviously, we've moved past the idea that God is interested in sacrificing animals.

But I want to say we've done that a little bit to our detriment.

Here's why we have very little connection with the earth nowadays.

I just I just want to say that, right?

And the interesting part about sacrificing animals was depending on which rabbi you read, it's not to appease God, it's because killing, period, is against God's intention.

So God does not intend for us to kill humans, God doesn't intend for us to kill animals.

So in the sacrificial system, is you really are taking a life of an animal, and there needs to be some recognition of that.

So I think properly put, right, there's a higher place for sacrifice than we say, because to eat an animal, you are taking a life.

Now you can maybe justify it, but most of our children and most of us, I mean, I've heard people say, if I had to kill the animal, I would be a vegetarian.

And my response is, then you probably should be.

Because an animal has to die for you to eat it.

And if you're not willing to do it.

Now, listen, I'm not telling you, Mike says, if you won't kill your own meat, you shouldn't eat it.

But it is an interesting thing to think about because 50 years ago, in fact, you did do that.

And we've got this really commercial process of killing animals, but is so sanitized and removed, you know, um, that I think some notion of sacrifice might be an ethical boom to us.

But I think part of what the prophets are saying when you hear these lines is if our like fidelity to God is limited to what we do in rituals, we're missing the invitation for it to permeate our lives.

I mean, that's very prophetic.

God is not just interested in what happens in churches on Sunday morning.

Did this say that in here?

Okay, one point one there a line along those lines?

Yes.

And we can find that in the Psalms left and right.

And so the way it seems to go is listen, if you've got to pick between the way you're worshiping and justice, if you had to pick, pick justice.

But since you don't have to pick, do the justice and the worship.

There's a line in the Iona book at the end of the service that we have, there, the end of the Eucharist in Iona that says, the Eucharist is completed, the service begins.

That's when you're leaving.

There, I think there's some balance.

And there's some some kind of line that says that like service without worship is myopic, but worship without service is the other extreme that's really bad.

I hope that makes sense.

I think that's what the prophets would say.

So I don't think what they mean is literally never do this again.

I think they're saying, like, why don't you hit pause until you can fix this area that is really bad and then hit resume.

Um I think that doesn't mean that we are going to be moving into the future.

This is a really interesting thing.

Now I have to tell you about first Isaiah.

This is sort of beyond my comprehension, this image.

And it's it's one of these things that like comes close to inspiration in a vexing way to me.

So think through what he's saying that the wolf will lie down with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the goat, and the bear will lie down with the bull, right?

That not just that, I mean, you can obviously shoot them full of drugs and they'll do that, or you can feed the leopard to the point where it's sated, and you could do this, right?

But I think the image is about natural predators and prey being able to rest with one another in a non-drug-induced stupor, right?

I mean, this is like, in some ways, the overturning of even something very natural that God created.

I mean, God created the saber-toothed tiger, and it was not a vegetarian, contrary to what my Seventh Baptist Sunday school teacher told me, that all the animals are vegetarians, and then human beings ruin that.

I mean, it's ludicrous, right?

So God created the whole prey-predator cycle, and then the prophets got this vision that God's going to even improve upon that.

Because there won't even be any kind of competition or violence among.

I mean, the food chain is going to be leveled.

And this is a really interesting image because it's it's it goes to something that's like natural and inherent in the world to say that there won't be then this dominance between kings and thieves or between convicted felons and the rest of us.

Like God is somehow going to reconcile even natural enemies.

And to be honest with you, it's so beyond us.

Because the way uh we've grown up in church, or I way I grew up in church, right, is bad people go to hell.

Um, but I don't think that's this image.

I think the image is God is going to reconcile the bad people with the good people, and you may not even want that to happen.

People, I think, will be very disappointed with God's justice in the end, which is sad.

We'll be disappointed with what God does because it's so much greater and more merciful than we would even want.

I think so.

If God reconciles the good and the bad people then there would be no bad people.

And this is an interesting thing.

Are there bad people?

I suspect there's some people means I suspect there's some people no matter what.

No matter what.

And then there are some people who are on the other end who are to read.

And this is like the prophetic imagination, and this is what I want to say, like, it's beyond my own imagination.

To think that God is going to reconcile even natural enemies.

I mean, like, this is gonna sound crazy because this is where the rebel meets.

Now you can decide you agree with where I think this is maybe going or not, right?

Um but this sort of means that God's going to reconcile a rape victim with their rapist.

Now, I don't know if that can happen on earth.

And I would never use the word that it should.

Because I think there's a really big difference between forgiveness and reconciliation.

Yes.

Right?

Forgiveness means I'm reconciled with my past, but I don't have to have a future with you.

In fact, I can forgive you without ever talking to you again.

It just means I'm no longer, in some ways, hurting from what happened.

I can be grateful for who I am, regardless of how bad it was getting here, right?

But reconciliation is where you want a future together.

And as you know, you both have to want it or you can't ever have it.

So one person can work their buns off to be reconciled, and if the other person doesn't, it doesn't work.

And that's where it's super tough, right?

So so I don't know if Isaiah is saying, I know he's not saying this directly, but but but but I wonder if he's saying Madeline.

Maybe forgiveness is the best you can do, but God will accomplish reconciliation for you.

Whether you're willing or not.

That's that's an interesting phrase, right?

Both sides.

And God and and we may not be able to do it while we're alive.

Don't worry, God will do it when you die.

Well, that makes me a little bit worried because I may not want God to do it.

And this I think is the interesting thing to return to, right?

Which is a vision I think that is so much bigger than I can even kind of imagine.

There is one theologian I don't remember his name, who believes that somewhere everyone will be reconciled with God and will accept God, some may have to go through the journey than others.

Yeah.

But at the end, everyone will be reconciled.

So so Carl Bart is like the first person who really put that out, and there's this idea of predestination.

And I don't know if you heard this before.

It goes sort of like this number six is in a fix, and number seven goes to heaven.

It's sort of the classic definition is God's already picked who makes it and who doesn't.

Um, and Carl Bart said, no, no, predestination doesn't mean that.

What God is predestined is how it is that we all make it.

And God, the God's predestination was Jesus.

So if Adam and Eve never did anything wrong, doesn't matter, Jesus was still gonna come to earth and end up dying.

Like that was it.

Jesus wasn't like plan B, he actually was plan A.

This is Carl Barth's Dunce COTUS said this first, the Dunce cap that came from him.

So this was Karl Barth's thinking is that the means of salvation was predestined, not the objects or the subjects, rather.

Um and that's an interesting thing to think through.

And there was also one I think and I don't remember who is basically proposed that hell was an empty place.

And you know, that's Augustine who said hell is just a total completely absence.

Hell is what I think.

Absence.

It's just nothing.

So what I guess we're saying that someone being a whatever spiritual ends up in hell.

They're there, but it's not well there's nowhere to go.

And there's another way to think, there's lots of different ways we think about this.

Um C.S.

Lewis in the book The Great Divorce says hell is only eternal if we choose that.

So there is this hell place, and people go there.

But God is like driving a bus there every day, saying, like, get on the bus, let's get out of here, and people like ignore that, but they don't have to.

He didn't later he says that could be part of our earthly journey, which I think is more right, to be honest.

Um, some people, I think, you know, like I think the doctrine of purgatory makes a little more sense, which is it's not forever.

This this place where you sort of atone for whatever you did, and then you move them on, you know.

Um we we we struggle with all of these kinds of images, but I think what's really interesting is that we get this other image that I again I think is just beyond us.

But it may not have to be.

I think this is one of those things where Isaiah uses something very, very familiar to us, which is like natural predators, and says, like in the peaceable kingdom that'll be undone, and um, instead of us then imagining ways in which God is like us, what Isaiah does is uses things we understand very well to show us how little we understand God.

And like it's interesting, most images I grew up in church were things that I understood very well, and God was like what I understood.

And this is an image of something I understand very well, is telling me God is not like what I understand.

Because God is greater than what I understand.

God is judge who condemns people.

I get that.

Isaiah is saying God who created competition and rivalry in the world is going to uncreate that.

And again, I'm good at being competitive.

I'm not even sure I want that.

And Isaiah is saying we should want something greater than we've settled for and that we're good at.

That we should want the rules of the game to change in favor of everybody else, even if we're already winners.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Was he the first person that proposed that?

It's the first time we see it in scripture.

I don't know if he's the first one.

I mean, we can never answer that.

The second Isaiah will mimic it.

You'll see it again in Deutero Isaiah, this image, but not with all of these sorts of pairings.

And what's interesting is in the stained glass here that's in the chapel, these are the final bits you'll see in the doors.

Is um disunity in the beginning, and you can look at the poster in the Omega in God's end, um, the the constellations of like Ursa Major are reconciled with Taurus.

They sort of come to together, so it happens not even just at the earthly level, but at the universal level.

Anyway.

What does reconcile mean?

Well, uh, it's interesting, at its like most basic level, it means you know that you read that you once again are conciliar, which doesn't mean polite, but frankly, like you sit on a council together, like you you're in dialogue with one another again.

Is this is reconciliation consensus?

I think, honestly, like I think the best image of reconciliation is, or like the thing that underpins it, is we have more in common than we have different.

So reconciliation is never about uniform.

Harmony, it's always about unity.

And we're willing to focus on the commonality rather than the differences.

Except for me, it's acceptance of differences.

It's not getting rid of differences, but being willing to focus on the commonality and be respective of the differences.

I think so.

It's even easier to think about this happening with humans.

It's so funny, right, that it's taken us a long time to get to this like very succinct argument, which is at the end of the day, there aren't gay rights or women's rights, there are just human rights.

Which is mind-boggling.

Yeah.

But but I think like that's sort of the idea.

And then you get some other things about how that works, right?

Like Ignatius of Loola says in the spiritual exercises, when someone says something to you, it is a spiritual discipline to hear it in the best possible way.

Even if they say, like, I hate you, your job is to hear that in the most positive way possible.

And I think that comes from Isaiah, or I think that's an actually really interesting analog, is that even in moments of like saber rattling and teeth bearing, the wolf is trying to lay down with you.

So how can you lay down with the wolf?

You hear this hear this sermon on Sunday because it's about St.

Francis this week.

And I was naughty and I used the scripture when I wasn't supposed to, because I think it matches.

Or ignored?

Well, as a parent, I would much rather my child were ugly to me than ignored me.

Or a friend.

Yes.

Some friends, I would much rather they just ignored me to be honest.

Like left me alone.

Yeah.

No, I know.

It's an interesting thing.

And of course, you you know the difficulty is to get to this vision.

I mean, some of the bunnies are going to get killed, and some of the lambs are going to get killed.

And of course, I don't think Isaiah is saying, put your sheep with the wolves until they sort it out.

That's nuts.

I think what he's saying is, like, we understand about protection and we understand natural consequences.

I think we understand, I'm just going to be really honest, there's certain things I don't know if I can be reconciled to people with in this life.

And I don't think God's mad at me about that.

Actually, I think God fully understands.

I get you can't do it.

And I'm going to do it for you.

So, some ways I think we sell ourselves out of reconciliation way too easily.

Like we say nope to hell with you.

And I think this is saying, look, since God's going to do it later, maybe we could do some of it now for our own sake.

However, there are no ways that I want innocent people to be put at risk without their own choice or understanding of what they're doing, if that makes sense, right?

Think of the children.

I think that makes a whole lot of sense.

But it's messy, right?

So again, like you understand there's this thing called Megan's Law, and hey, you can be a sex offender if you have sex with a 17-year-old when you're 18, and if they push it, then you're on Megan's list, right?

And then you can't live within such a distance of a school.

It shows up on all of their job applications, and of course, people are actively going to discriminate against those people.

In some ways it's reasonable, in other ways it isn't.

And what are they going to do now?

It was hard enough to get a job before, and now they it's even harder, so maybe you're pushing them to a life of crime.

I mean, I don't I don't know the answer to that.

It's messy on earth.

But this is saying what God's going to do.

I think.

And it's it prophetic for the coming of Jesus?

Maybe.

I don't know.

I mean, I here's what I think is really important to say, because we get some of the things you're going to hear in Advent out of one Isaiah.

I don't think Isaiah was predicting Jesus at all.

I think instead Jesus shows up and resonates with these words, and people said, aha! Like, look, here's Jesus representing these words.

And that's when Jesus says, I didn't come to change the scriptures, but to fulfill them.

I don't think he means, hey, the prophets were predicting me.

I think he was saying the prophets had these images of God's graciousness and the way God's going to work.

And people said, Oh, oh, like I've heard this tune before when they see Jesus.

I've heard it in the holy books.

Because I'll tell you, when you read the Gospels, some of the gospel writers change the words of the prophets.

They cheat.

But they're not doing it to make them write predictors.

What they're saying is, like, Jesus reverberates with this.

Should I give you an example of that?

Yes.

How many of you two?

The prophet Matthew, this is like the low-hanging fruit, says, uh, it's written, he'll become he will be a Nazarene, because Jesus is from Nazareth.

Well, that isn't what the prophet wrote at all.

The prophet wrote, He'll be a Nazarite.

The Nazarites were people who took vows, and during the vow time, they didn't drink wine or eat any meat, and they didn't cut their hair.

When the vow was over, they went back to doing all that stuff.

Well, Jesus actually didn't wasn't ever a Nazarite.

John the Baptist was his whole life.

But Matthew changes it from Nazarite to Nazarene.

So look, not only does he represent a vow taker symbolically, but he's from Nazareth.

He's not trying to say the prophet predicted that.

He's trying to say, look, this guy, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, you know, like bells should be going off in your head.

He sort of represents this promise in spirit without having to do it factually.

Does that I hope that makes sense?

Um, there's another one here, Matthew.

And and I mean in Isaiah, right?

Which is that, hey, behold, the young woman shall give birth, and you will call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.

Right?

Now it's such a beautiful sign.

It's a beautiful thing, and we do something really interesting with it.

So I hope it's okay to tell you that Hebrew language, again, only has 10,000 words, very word poor, and there is no such word for a woman who has never had sexual intercourse.

That word does not exist in Hebrew.

There is young woman and there is woman.

It's an age category, not a sexual category.

Well, um we talked about this a long, long time ago, but uh Hebrew language started to become a dead language.

People actually spoke Aramaic first, and then Alexander made everybody speak Greek, and nobody could read Hebrew for sure except for priests, and nobody even really spoke it, so they had to translate it into the lingua franca or the vernacular.

And they chose to do this by translating it from Hebrew into Greek.

The story is really interesting.

70 rabbis did it independently and compared their translations, and they didn't vary at a single word, which is a miracle because two Jewish people can never agree about anything.

And by the way, that thing that I just said wasn't me saying that.

The rabbis themselves say two Jewish people can never agree about anything, and that's why it's a miracle, which is why the Greek Hebrew Bible is called the Septuagint, it means 70.

70 rabbis.

Well, when they translated this, behold, the young woman will give birth, Greek actually does have a word for sexual categories.

They picked the word virgin, not young woman in Greek.

So this is what happened.

Originally, Isaiah said a young woman, the Septuagint says virgin.

Now, we only know one virgin that gave birth to somebody, right?

That's Mary.

But it's very plain to see when we read Isaiah for ourselves.

Isaiah is not talking about the Virgin Mary, he's talking about the king's wife.

In the middle of the siege, listen, the young lady is gonna have a baby, and before the baby is uh of age, the armies will be gone.

And by the way, that's what happened.

So it was a sign.

Which came this is King um Hezekiah.

Now, to say that Isaiah was predicting the Virgin Mary, I think as a stretch, but to say, listen, we're affronted by threatening forces, and Jesus represents God's sign that there will be deliverance, is this fulfillment.

Yeah.

And I you know, there's another interesting thing, because again, we usually stop the reading, we usually stop the reading with um there's a child and he'll be named Emmanuel.

But then if you keep reading, right, he'll eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.

So by the time he knows what's right and wrong, or by the time he knows like what you expect and can obey, which is like two, he'll be eating curds and wild honey.

Well, you you can't have that in a siege because your animals have no pastorage, right?

The way you get curds and honey is you have land, which means the siege is over.

Now we usually don't mention that bit about Jesus because Jesus wasn't born during a siege.

Does this make sense?

But this thing that like sieges you find yourself in in life, God offers some deliverance, is the way we've taken that to be figurative.

Here it's specific.

Well, wouldn't King Herod be oppressive?

Yeah, he was oppressive, but he wasn't sieging people in their towns.

I mean, he just collected heavy taxes.

But we have, and that's where it's like, again, we can say, oh, okay, like oppressive taxes are bad, like a siege is bad, but they're of totally different qualities, right?

Oppressive taxes are bad.

But doing sieges, you're drinking, and the prophet's really clear, like you're drinking your own urine, you're eating your babies.

I'm saying this because I I I see people immediately just hearing, okay, there's this child over there.

He goes, Like, this is bad.

I know I'm not gonna like this person, I want to get rid of him somewhere or the other.

And other people would say, you know, let's go see this child.

They knew this was somebody we're gonna love.

People love Jesus, and other people despise him just for because people are different, good and bad.

That's what I'm thinking.

And I hope it's okay to say this early.

I'm not really quite sure what kind of reception Jesus would have if he came today.

I'm actually relatively sure most church people would not care for him or recognize him.

Because I think what Jesus did do is affront a lot of the values we hold most sacred.

And I'm gonna say this for myself, and often like you read these stories in the gospel, and the disciples are like, What do you mean?

What do you mean?

And we always think, you dumb disciples, of course we know what he means.

Which makes me think like if Jesus is easy to understand and easy to follow, we got it wrong.

The guy had to be really a buzzkill at the kind of parties I would most enjoy.

Yeah, but he went out the wine party.

He did that.

He won't have the wine.

But he invited the people he invited people like the creeps.

Sorry, he invited creeps to parties, and like I don't like partying with creeps.

So hitting the guy on the corner and saying, come to my party.

Yeah, I didn't want that guy there.

I don't even want him serving or picking up the trash.

But that's the thing, right?

I mean, that's kind of tough.

And we can say, like, oh, that's so good, but we don't do that.

Let's just be honest, we don't do that.

So this I think is part of the rub, and this is where Jesus resonates with the prophets because they're really pushing that.

Isaiah, we didn't read this directly, but Isaiah is a member of the gentry.

He he is a priest.

So he's literate and and he's got connections.

And one of the things he does, because prophets, for prophets, sometimes actions speak louder than words, we got to read it in our book, is to show what's going to happen to the people, he walks around naked for a year and a half.

Yeah, that was kind of weird.

Yeah.

It's kind of really weird, right?

Actions speak louder than words.

It was weird back then.

And he had the luxury of being able to do that because he was a rich person, a poor person walking around naked.

You'd what would you do?

You'd flog them, throw them in jail.

But this guy was too big to do that.

He's an aristocrat.

I'm sure people thought he was crazy.

What happened when we go?

It's Jerusalem, it's not much cold.

Right?

So much craziness going on in all of this stuff.

And then we would despair of eating good people with this bunch of stuff that was going on.

And times aren't so much different, are they really?

I mean, you know, I think they are.

I think they're not bad right here.

But somewhere in the world, awful things are happening.

You know, you've got to go this way.

All this stuff is different because we understand it a little bit more.

I actually read the wrong chapter.

You're just as well.

You're just as well.

And well, and it went into the the good parts of the profits, you know, the nice things that can happen.

I can't hardly see it happening here because people wouldn't accept it.

You know, they wouldn't accept, oh well, we're gonna stop this, and you're not gonna make all this money, and everybody's gonna be equal and taken care of, and they won't be like that.

Actually, have you ever seen George Burns' movie where he's God?

It was it was so beautiful because when he appeared amongst all the religious leaders and talked to them about this is not what I wanted.

I mean it was such a an interesting look.

If you read the Bible, it was an interesting look at God made it that way.

You know, to the teachers and for the church.

Um I think all the nice things will be happening after the second incoming of Jerusalem in the new setting.

They believe.

It's too hard to believe for a lot of people.

Because you have to go by the rules.

You know, God gives you intellect and free will.

I think that's why the prophetic imagination is asking us to re-imagine.

I mean, I do believe this strongly wouldn't have said it Sunday.

Instead of seeing is believing, I really think what we believe determines what we see.

And so if we were to change our imagination a bit, then I think we w we'd see a different world than we usually see.

And I gotta tell you, sometimes I read poets and I think that's really great and it's nuts, but you know, like Walt Whitman says, like, you know, a blade of grass is just as miraculous as whatever, a supernova or somebody getting raised from the dead.

And, you know, we say, no, that's not right.

But what if we did believe that?

God's creator.

So I think the prophets really, that's part of their push.

I think some of it is, hey, like, I don't think it's really doom and gloom.

I think it's really saying the natural consequences of your imagination and what you choose to settle for are are blank blankety blank.

So so what if you changed your idols, your images, then maybe you would see God more at work in the world, and then your future would roll out according to what you're able to envision.

I I think so.

And it takes a ton of work to do that.

Um a couple of those things that he stretches people on.

So when he's in a his call, is he sees the temple and there's the seraphim, and I don't know if you notice this, but the hem of God's robe fills the temple.

This is a dramatic thing for the people of the time because they believed God lived in the temple.

The temple was like smaller than our church.

I sort of put that in perspective.

The sanctuary at St.

Thomas is bigger than the Jerusalem temple when Isaiah was around, which means they thought that God was about, well, 40 feet tall.

And God didn't sit on the ark, you know, the ark is God's footstool, so God stood on it, which told you how big God's feet were.

You see, God's like a giant.

This is kind of how they imagined.

And Isaiah is saying, oh, no, no, no.

God doesn't fit in the temple, God's robe, the hymn overflows.

Now we might say, well, God's even bigger than that.

Yes, but at the time, you see, he's really stretching people's imagination to how much bigger God is than they choose to settle for.

And and and coming back a little bit to C.S.

Lewis, and I know I've said this before, I'm sorry, but again, this stretches, I think, our imagination.

The universe apparently is infinitely expanding.

So, what does that do spatially with God?

Well, if God's holding the universe, then I suppose God's hand must also be infinitely expanding, right?

And then there's this question about uh, well, is God holding the universe, or is the universe contained inside of God?

Or is the universe God?

And growing.

I mean, this is really interesting, right?

And then that brings up this question of hell.

This is a really vexing thing for us to get our heads around, because as a little boy, I was told hell is separation from God.

The prayer book says that's what sin is, not hell.

But of course, if hell is a place that's separate from God and it's real, then God isn't everywhere.

And that seems like an unacceptable conclusion, right?

So one of my professors in school said, oh no, no, um, God is in hell, or a better way to think about it, hell is in God, and hell is just the ulcer in God's stomach.

Now, that's really hard to compartmentalize, right?

I mean, because again, it challenges our imagination, which is what I think the prophets want to do, because when we can imagine something greater than we've said before, then we can start to see God in places we couldn't before, and we can follow that vision into greater living.

I have to admit, I have a hard time reading reading between the lines, if you will.

Because when I read this, I thought, okay, this is another um, this is another description of people not following the covenant, and now I'm going now God is going to punish them by spreading them throughout the world.

Um as with the Israelites and then with uh Israel and then with Judah.

Um sort of the same thing, but at a different time.

So when it comes to some of the stuff that we're talking about here, I didn't get that.

That's what we get to come together and talk about historically.

Like and honestly some of the stuff you mentioned, yeah, I read it and I see what you're saying.

Yeah.

Some some things I get, but mostly I was reading, okay, this is just another one of those.

God is mad at the people because they're not following the covenant, now he's gonna make them pay.

And so this is, I can think, a really interesting thing to think about, right?

At the time this was written, people thought.

Everything comes from God.

So if something bad happens, God's punishing you.

Right?

And by the way, we kind of all buy into that because we were raised that way.

If you ever find yourself like, what did I do to deserve this?

It's evidence, even just if you say that, that you believe that.

That came from somewhere, right?

And so they did not believe in a devil.

So, good or bad, it all came from God.

Now we have made a little room.

So if something bad happens, could be God's allowing it, God's testing us, could be that the devil is doing this and not God.

But I think we have to sort of struggle with like the basic worldview assumption, right?

Which again, like we did this all last year in the Bible study with Proverbs and the wisdom writing, do you get what you pay for?

Is karma real?

Or is or is karma a way that we say, aha, the world is a linear place?

A lot of the world seems to be linear, and plenty of it seems not to be, quite honestly.

And what do we do with the paradoxes?

Well, we say test or punish or devil, or or I think we have to do something different, which is say, right, um, hey, the world is not always linear.

And um God doesn't God's not beholden to me.

So even though I want it to be linear, God doesn't actually seem to care that it's linear all the time.

Okay, so I'm I'm gonna be the one here that doesn't explain linear.

Well, everything has, if not causation, has really high correlation in a linear or or nonlinear relationship, speaking mathematically or statistically, right?

I use the term transactional.

I mean if you do something you get what you pay for.

That is sometimes true.

That is sometimes true.

In fact, I teach my kids to expect that, right?

Because I believe living into that value of doing good.

Yeah, right?

And and we all teach our children to expect linearity when we go to them when they cry.

If we showed up whenever we wanted to, their brain would actually be hardwired to believe the world is very random and what that results in, right, is fundamental distrust in their own industry, in their own ability to make intimate relationships.

Eric Erickson sort of lays all this out, right?

Like you go through these stages, and if your needs aren't met, you come up with the wrong takeaway, right?

Like instead of industry, you believe you're inferior.

And instead of being able to make intimate relationships, you're going to live in isolation.

People who receive trauma in their early years pretty much take all those negatives, and reforming them is like maybe impossible.

It's hard to know, right?

Um, because I know people who experience trauma like very intimately, and I see that they actually are kind of hardwired for isolation.

I'm actually pretty convinced that this is a little messy, if that makes sense.

I mean, the takeaway I get from people who grew up with reactive attachment disorder in Romanian orphanages is that they may never be able to have a brain like mine.

The best they can do is fake it.

They have to pretend to trust, because they will never be able to.

And that is a real crazy thing to think like, how does God let that happen?

It's really hard to reconcile faith with that, right?

And and then I think, well, the thing for me I have to do is God does let that happen.

And why doesn't God fix it?

I don't know.

What I did learn a long time ago is when my adolescent child who was formed in trauma would do things and I would ask why.

There were a couple of things I came to realize within the last year and a half.

He didn't know why.

He didn't.

No answer he gave me would have satisfied me anyway.

Because if he'd said I did it because of this, I would say, well, that was dumb.

So I would not have been satisfied.

So a lot of times the why questions, they're not even real questions.

They're us when we say why, they're us saying, you're stupid.

I don't know if you've ever thought about this.

When we want to know why, will we actually be satisfied?

I think one way to read Job is that Job asks the wrong questions.

Because God sort of says, Listen, I'm doing all this other stuff.

Tell me if you understand that.

Which is to say, Job, if I told you why, you'd probably still accuse me anyway.

So maybe, maybe sometimes we ask the why question instead of asking, How shall I be now?

How shall I be?

So I don't know, we all have to figure this out in our prophetic imagination, right?

Where is God when somebody is abusing a child?

Is there a lesson in Job on how to overcome this hard wiring that's damaging?

Because Job got over this and redid his life.

Well, I mean, yeah, and at the same time, he got new kids, but his kids died.

And like I don't think kids are commodities that you replace.

So at the end of the day, like his kids all died.

And his trauma, his trauma was current, not a child.

Yeah.

You know, so so there's not there wasn't a hard wiring there.

Yeah, I mean, Joe grew up, apparently, grew up being held and comforted, you know.

I mean, this this is hard stuff, right?

When when we ask a person who is traumatized and hardwired, why?

We're trying to get answers for our brain.

That's right.

And it doesn't compute because their brain doesn't work our way.

The same analogy with God.

When we ask God why, we're trying to understand with our human brain, and God's brain it doesn't compute either because he is God and He doesn't have our brain.

So I don't think we'll ever understand why.

And this this this book, Tim had me read this book called I Am God.

It's a really interesting book, and again, it starts out with saying, I'm God, I don't think.

People think, I don't think.

And essentially, like we think, well, God must feel angry.

Really?

Does God have feelings?

Or do we have feelings?

And we use our feelings to try to understand God, right?

But I do think we have to come up with understandings of God at some certain level.

Whatever level we can.

And then hopefully, I think what the prophets do is whatever you settled for, see if you can't just stretch that to be bigger than what you've settled for, right?

So if someone's abusing a child, we could say, well, God's testing their faith.

That's so icky for me.

We could say, it's because somebody else didn't step in and stop that.

Well, then God's kind of weak, right?

I had a friend whose image was that God is actually there begging the person to stop.

And it's really up to the person whether they stop or not.

But God is constantly inviting them to be bigger than themselves.

And it's really sad when you read that most people who abuse children were themselves abused as children.

And where does it come from?

It came from their parents and who started it, who knows.

Uh I'm not justifying it.

I'm not justifying it.

We always are going to be uncomfortable when something happens to people we call innocent.

Right?

And and I told you a couple of weeks ago, somebody put this really succinctly at my last school.

There was a family where, like, a child was getting really good financial aid at a really great school, and it was really clear the parents didn't deserve it.

They weren't working, or you know, they were willy-nilly about getting the kid to school.

And somebody said, Well, yeah, the parents don't deserve it at all.

But the child doesn't deserve what their parents are going to hand to them either.

And it was sort of an interesting thing to think about that maybe God works in some ways that resonate with that.

I don't know if that makes sense, right?

Because we read the rain falls on the just and the unjust.

And that seems to be the case.

And sometimes we say, well, rich people who are evil, they're not really happy.

And that's the way that we try to make the world more linear.

They could be happy as hell, who knows?

You know why do they have to be miserable?

I mean, they, you know, they may not be.

We might be miserable thinking about how they have more than us, and then our opportunity is to be satisfied with what we have.

But I have a I have a friend who is a financial advisor, and he advises people who have a lot of money.

And he says it doesn't matter how much money they have, they never think they have enough.

Almost everybody says they want 10% more, right?

And it is interesting that the the Pew group did a study that happiness goes up with your income, lockstep linear positive, until you get to about$75,000.

And then the increase is marginal, and it might even go down.

Which is crazy to think about, isn't it?

And I think this is one of those interesting questions that the prophets ask, and I don't want to be too spiritual devotional, this is like my good Catholic nun coming out of me, though, right?

Is the prophets ask us to really reconsider our center?

So if we find ourselves thinking, the next thing I would buy is this.

If I won the lottery, I would do this.

When this happens, I'll be happy.

I think the prophets ask us to consider how can I create justice for other people?

How can I be grateful for what it is that I have?

How can I find God even in the tedious things I've got?

And and I said this Sunday, and I believe it, our brains are hardwired to do this.

Hardwired, and that these mass messages travel 50,000 times faster from our reptilian brain that really wants to hoard.

It wants to hoard and it wants to compete, than from our mammalian brain that really wants to take care of other people.

That's what mammals do, they take care of things that can't take care of themselves.

And you know this image, right, where you'll see like a dog raise a lion cub whose mother is, and the dog will do it and not complain.

Because our brain is actually kind of hardwired to take care of things at the mammal level.

Lizards would never do that because it's all about competition.

But mammals, even animals do that.

But I think all of that, again, is what Isaiah is really trying to get us to do.

And as I said last week, I think usually we we make idolatry so easy to define that we clearly don't do it and it's no problem, and all people who do it are stupid.

And and this kind of thing, like what we settle for, that's the definition of idolatry.

And the way we resist idolatry is by stretching.

And there's times I just really need to take a rest, you know, because like one thing a year is good, you know.

I can pace myself, but as you all know, um people offer us opportunities to grow.

That's the definition of conflict, is opportunities to grow.

But usually what we see is annoyance and opportunity.

You know, I read this quote the other day the difference between an adventure and inconvenience is all how we look at it.

Oh that's really true.

Yeah, I think that was very cool what you were saying about the reptilian versus the mental brain.

But we and and our brain can be rewired, it doesn't matter how old you are, but it just takes it just takes work and like patience is not the right word, but you know, in some ways, like it takes discipline, I think so.

Sometimes it bothers me that the church is slow, but any sustainable growth probably is slow.

Like doing things really quickly may not be sustainable.

At the same time, it's really interesting to think that if we'd waited for a national convention to affirm um ordination of women, I don't think it would have happened yet.

What happened is some bishops just did it, and then people had to contend with it.

You know, and in some ways, like that's prophetic action is contend with this.

Like the guy standing in front of the tank in the Tian Men Square, right?

If they'd had a conversation, they wouldn't have stopped.

But you know, when you stood there, then then you got a real choice in front of you, not just a wordy comic strip, if that makes sense.

And that's the way sometimes our actions can change our thinking before our thinking can change our actions.

I don't know if that makes sense.

I think that's the way it has to be.

Like I think we need both halves of our brains to really balance.

You know, if we go out and we do these things and we never kind of mentally reconcile that they're okay, um, I think it's I think it's hard.

Yeah, I think we can think about things just too long.

You go ahead and do it, and then yeah.

Yeah.

You know, it's kind of like winning in the battle sometimes, you know.

You don't know exactly what's gonna happen, but you go in the battle and then you figure out how to dream it.

Yeah.

And such is like living in the dreams, right?

If you let all of the outcomes and implications, if you sort of do all of them before you do it, you wouldn't really do anything.

Right.

So at a certain point we do have to live with our feet.

But we don't want to be profligate either.

So I think we always try to figure out how do we how do we balance this stuff.

Um couple other ones that are really great.

Um, and and I don't know um if you saw this.

We we saw it last week, right?

Is that uh in those days, spears will be turned to pruning hooks.

Which is like there was this speaker at clergy conference who's a Mennonite up in Pennsylvania, that's where lots of Mennonites are, and they they did this project where they took people's um assault rifles and turned them into garden tools.

So they they like forge shovel ends or like hoe ends to them, and it's just a really interesting image, isn't it?

Um again asking us to consider how do we use the weapons of war to be weapons of like cultivation in the future.

Um there's a couple of other things maybe that are helpful to hear, like a a shoot will come out of Jesse.

Yeah.

And I I want to make sure you don't feel like you have to limit that to a person.

The shoot that comes out of Jesse can simply be the people, the people who choose to live into God's imagination.

It could be one person, but it could just as well be an entire people.

Say again.

What what where was that?

That's an eleven.

An eleven.

It comes after the wolf.

Oh no, it's at the very beginning.

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the Lord will rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord, and he won't judge by what his eyes see.

So, I mean, we could decide that's a king, aha, because David came from Jesse, but we could also decide that that's a fundamental way of being for God's people.

That we don't judge by what our eyes see, that we judge by God's imagination.

I don't know if that makes sense.

We'll get to come back to.

Number one is that we have, again, our imagination when it comes to like spiritual things is really awful.

So um seraphs and cherubs are the kinds of angels, sort of.

By the way, angels may not even be things.

Angel means messenger.

Seraph is no doubt a flying snake that is perpetually on fire.

So if you've if you've thought of, if you've seen the medical symbol, the two snakes around the pole, that's really old.

The snake shed its skin, so it's immortal, but it seraph means burning one, literally, and it's it's a cognate of of the serpent.

So we think it's a flying snake.

Two wings cover its face, it flies with two wings, and the other two wings cover its.

Do you know?

It said two wings on its face, and two wings on its feet.

Its feet.

One one.

Serpents don't have feet, and this is a real clue to you.

Foot is a euphemism for the word genitals in Hebrew.

So it's interesting, flying snakes have genitals.

Now we don't always think about genitalia angels, right?

Even though we like to say Gabriel's a boy or whatever, but the Bible's really clear that these spiritual beings, and this you can read this in Genesis chapter six, like they have sex with women and they produce like heroes and giants and stuff.

So we we don't buy that worldview, but we just it's important to know we completely have reimagined like the heavenly landscape.

There's flying snakes with genitals, and they have to cover those in God's presence.

What's the point of them in the Bible?

They just, I think if we're if we can do a lot of different things, we can say, aha, like gods like a king, and kings have butlers and valets and servants, and so heavens like that.

Or I think we could go to the heart of it and say they represent in some ways like supernatural identities.

I don't want to say supernatural powers, but again, like for me, the most logical understanding is like things that are beyond individual control.

So when I hear about unclean spirits, we usually call that demon, but demon means unclean spirit in Greek.

Like we made that word up, it's not an English word.

Demon means unclean spirit.

Boy, I know unclean spirits.

Like I know what it's like to see somebody like spank their child to correct them and see that person lose their temper and beat their child.

I would call that an unclean spirit.

Mob mentalities are unclean spirits where like really decent folk lose their mind for no reason, except there's an unclean spirit.

Racism is an unclean spirit because no person can control it.

I don't know if that makes sense.

So that represents the bad bits.

But then there's these other sort of, I don't know if it's good bits, but I think they start to become like they just become locative for us.

So, you know, like we you you see it in Daniel and Revelation, it'll say to the angel of the church of Smyrna, right?

The angel.

Well, I like to the like to the ethos or to the spirit, right?

Because again, there can be good mob mentalities as well.

Like people can get swept up into doing really lovely things.

So I think I think it becomes this sort of like way of saying um to the spirit of the people, right?

This represents these spirits.

Now, again, I I'm positive that the seraphim, you know, literally taken, sorry, I they're they're idols.

I'm not just are.

And you have to ask this question if God's everywhere, does God need like heavenly beings, servants, or whatever?

I mean, I think whatever we think about whether there's angels or demons is actually very irrelevant.

I think the question is what do we think about God that becomes most important, right?

We might need those things to imagine how God interacts.

Yeah.

It's the imagination trying to explain things.

Seraphim sound like the good cherubs are much worse, by the way, right?

Cherubs are way uglier than seraphim.

We'll read about them in Ezekiel, but they have four faces and they're covered with eyeballs, right?

I mean, you don't have those pictures at the enunciation.

I mean, so what is getting Gabriel.

Is Gabriel a person who comes to Mary with a message?

Is Gabriel a flying snake with genitals on fire that's like, hey, good news, lady, you're gonna have a baby?

I mean, I'd be terrified of that.

Or is Gabriel like got the face of an ox and a bird and a human and covered with eyeballs, you know?

Well, wouldn't it be isn't it a story of the evolution of our faith?

Because you know, we you know we came from very current to a better understanding of things.

So it's a evolution.

It could be.

I think the interesting thing about evolution though is the assumption that things are getting better.

I think like our technology has made things more efficient, but I'm not sure efficiency is always better than like an understanding.

I want to sound weird or shamanistic, but you know, we like we ridicule animistic people, like they think rocks have spirits, and they think animals have spirits.

I think my dog has a spirit, and I've been in places where I feel a spirit.

Like go to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and if you don't feel a spirit, it's strange.

Oddly enough, there's like swing sets on the other side of the barbed wire, and I could hear children swinging, and that was the strangest part of it at all.

You know, is that like anybody could live there knowing what had happened was just really confusing.

But I've been to places that are like super majestic, and like the hairs on my neck stand up in a great way, right?

Um, and Celtic people call those thin places, and I don't think they're ignorant.

I think what they're trying to do, I don't think they really mean like there's there's portals to heaven in some places, but we do find ourselves in thin places.

Um so I don't know some sometimes we take a step forward, and other ways we take steps back.

You know, again, like to view an animal as a commodity, I mean, that's the the gateway to becoming a serial killer.

Quite honestly, right?

If people have no compassion for animals, so I don't know the answer to that.

I mean, I think I think we could say, again, these people bowed down to statues and they had this all wrong, or we could say, okay, these people have an awareness of something that is not linear but that is experientially true, which is people don't always behave rationally.

And the way they explain that is with these like non-rational images.

I don't know if that's right.

I think this is like the role of art a little bit.

I mean, I I we can always mismanage art, you know, but like when you see a picture of a donkey and a picture of an elephant, like you get, aha, that's a symbol, you know.

And and if people a hundred years down the road saw that and were like, these people worship donkey, you know, and again, they could totally misunderstand what we were doing with them.

The images I think are meant to guide our imagination or to create this like common parlance.

If we fix on it, it becomes idolatry.

If we allow it to guide us, then it opens new new doors, right?

Sometimes people do like apparently supernatural things.

I don't know how it is Carl Lewis won that gold medal in 1996.

The guy was like 40.

So, you know, imagine, I don't even have to imagine.

I was watching it, and I was like, there's something supernatural about that guy.

You you know, and I don't even know that I'm wrong in saying that.

I don't think like Jesus filled him and helped him jump, but it was incredible.

I'm a fan of how about Tom Bree.

And and so maybe what we say is, no, really, really, the guy has great genes, he's chosen to take really good care of himself, he's found a diet plan that works for him, he's got really strong mental acuity, and all of that could be the explanation, but that um assembly all in one package is so rare that it's incredible.

It's a sin.

And he's got a good offensive line.

So there's always looking variables in everything, but you know, again, to sort of say like something is incredible is is maybe part of this part of this this this language.

And and you look at any of these people like Phelps, you know, he's got the perfect swimmer's body.

Yeah, I mean, if you if you if you want to identify every aspect that would make the perfect swimmer's body, he's got it.

And and this is the interesting thing about him, right?

Um, he swims for 11 hours a day.

And he might have friends, he he might know something about the world, but what we usually do is fixate on the one thing that we think is incredible and forget that there's a whole rest of the package.

I can tell you I have no interest in swimming 11 hours a day for my whole life.

I don't want to do that.

I don't want my kid to do that.

I want my kid to be a liberal arts person, you know?

So that becomes this interesting thing where we can focus on like a charism, which is like a spiritual gift or a physical gift or the confluence of all that, right?

He's clearly got a hardened will or he wouldn't be doing what he's doing, right?

So it's not just he's got ability, he he's interfacing with it, and it's incredible in that one area.

But I had no admiration for his theology, I don't even know what it is, right?

So then I think becomes this thing, right, where there's all this demigodery we create, and then what the Psalms, I don't know if they necessarily say, but they say, ascribe to God all you demigods.

So whether you're Michael Phelps or Martin Luther King Jr., or you're Frida Kahlo, okay, you're a demigod.

You had some spiritual, incredible thing, and you better ascribe to God.

Right?

So we could say, ah, they believe in this pantheon, there's this, and maybe they did.

But I think there's some reality to that too, right?

I mean, there are people who are like exceptional people at what they do more than we are.

Anyway, I don't know, I don't know the answer.

I don't know.

I think it's really I think it's nicer to give ancient people the benefit of the doubt, right?

Because Hezekiah's tunnel is like 1.2 kilometers and it zigzags, and and they started in two ends and met in the middle with a zigzag, and the grade is one percent constantly over the whole thing, and they didn't have iron tools.

I mean, so this is sort of interesting to think about what people can do.

Oh yeah, how did they do it?

We're not quite sure, but they did and they succeeded.

Could have been aliens, but I mean, you know.

These are the interesting things, though.

I think that you know, sometimes we again, when we look at these people and say, look, they're worshiping the Asherah pole, what dummies.

We're so much more advanced than they are.

I uh we could do that, and then I think we miss an opportunity to think really, what's the spirit of the critique?

Is it they bowed down to a pole, or is it they had settled for something that was taking them away from something greater?

But all of their gods were a lot smaller than the one who touched the odd or their god, the one who tried to trust was a lot bigger than all of these other little gods that people had.

Maybe, and but then I think the other question for us is is our God big enough to forgive people we can't?

Is our God big enough to give people stuff they don't deserve?

Is God our God big enough to fill in the blank?

Right?

So when we're talking about space, right, the difference between a God that's 40 feet tall and 400 miles tall seems really big from our perspective.

The truth is they're both spatially limited.

So in geologic thinking, it's really not much different.

I don't know if that makes sense.

The question I don't think is about the quantity of God, the question of size is about the quality of God.

And that I think is what the prophets ask us to redial back down.

What's the quality of God?

If God is just really better at you than getting even with people, then God's just a big you.

And you're worshiping yourself.

Or uh is God fundamentally different in like offensively generous ways than than we are?

Well, next we we'll read a couple others and see what you think.